Everything but the Coffee (28 page)

Then one night, I was driving our minivan and I passed a Starbucks. There they were—four bulging black bags sitting on the sidewalk. I drove around the block again and looked, and then I drove around again and looked again. If someone had been watching, they would have thought I was casing the joint. I was, sort of. On the third go round, I stopped in front of the Starbucks. I looked around again. When the coast was clear, I opened the van door and walked slowly over to the bags, not wanting to call attention to myself. One more look around. No one seemed to be looking. I grabbed a bag, threw it into the back of the Sienna, and dashed off.

The next morning I opened the trash bag. It held a lot of what you would expect a Starbucks trash bag to hold. A thin coat of coffee and cream from people pouring off the excess from their drinks and throwing away what they couldn’t finish covered everything: lids, wooden stirrers, java jackets, brown napkins and pastry bags, thick cardboard to-go trays, plastic knives and forks, straws and straw wrappers, and sugar and Splenda packets. Stuck to these things were half-eaten apples, chewed-on cheese squares, Caesar salad croutons, and discarded chunks of cranberry scone. Mixed in were single-serving butter and cream cheese packets. There were a few empty soda cans and Ethos Water bottles. There was plastic wrap from CDs and shortbread cookies, and a few chocolate milk boxes and balled-up sheets of wax paper. The bag also contained a crushed milk jug and several strips of cardboard. There were copies of the
Metro, New York Times, City Paper, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer
and
Philadelphia Daily News
, and even a week-old crumpled-up local section from the
Des Moines Register
. Someone had thrown away junk mail and a page from a daily planner. I uncovered a box for a new iPod and a blue Gap bag and a few other plastic bags from the grocery store. Some loose change had settled to the bottom—a handful of pennies, a nickel, and two dimes. But mostly there were cups—lots of plastic cups and even more paper cups with promises about saving the planet on each and every one of them.

THE PAPER CUPS

When I first discovered Starbucks in Southern California in 1993, employees automatically used two paper cups for serving the hot coffee. That way you could drink it without singeing your hand. Other places in those days gave you hot joe in white Styrofoam cups. While these containers didn’t burn your fingers, they seemed so artificial that they made the coffee inside seem just as fake. At the diner or at the corner grocery, they gave you coffee in a single paper cup topped by a flat plastic lid with, if you were lucky, a napkin wrapped around the outside. After you cut a hole in the top and took a few sips from the jagged spout, the napkin got wet and started to fall apart. When you peeled the bits of paper off, the cup was still hot and you were back to square one: either you burnt your hand, or you had to get another napkin (more wasted paper). At first, then, the Starbucks double cup seemed like a great leap forward.

I thought that until I ran into a friend of mine who ran a landfill outside a small town. He was the first person I knew who recycled, and this was long before any of us had heard of curbside pickup or sorting the plastic from the glass. “What’s with Starbucks?” he said to me after I had just finished singing the company’s praises. “Why are they so special that they get two cups for every customer?”
¹³

Starbucks officials must have also heard this question. Or maybe it was the bottom-line people who responded first, looking for a way to cut costs and eliminate one of the paper cups. Wherever the impetus came from, in August 1996, Starbucks and the Alliance for Environmental Innovation—a branch of Environmental Defense, a group that helps companies, including Wal-Mart in recent years, “do well by doing good”—entered into a partnership to, in the words of both groups, “reduce the environmental impacts of serving coffee in Starbucks retail stores.” From the start, they had a broad focus with one eye always on the paper cups.

By 1997, Starbucks replaced the second cup with a three-finger-wide insulated layer—a java jacket. Obviously, the sleeves saved paper. Pretty
soon, Starbucks salvaged even more paper—and more trees, water, and fuel—when it introduced jackets made out of 60 percent post–consumer use material—that is, paper made from discarded office paper, newspapers, cereal boxes, and other recycled materials. The company clearly felt good about this move, and it wanted latte drinkers to feel the same. “Starbucks,” it proclaims on every one of these sleeves, “is committed to reducing our environmental impact through increased use of post-consumer materials. Help us help the planet.”

Over the years, Starbucks has taken a number of other constructive steps to aid the planet. Each year, it donates money to the Earth Day Foundation to raise environmental awareness and improve environmental education. Around 2000 or so, it began to purchase significant amounts of alternative and wind-generated clean energy. It has also looked for ways to cut the use of electricity and trim carbon outputs from its stores. At the same time, it has established the Grounds for Coffee program. Many stores give away bags of used coffee grounds. This keeps them from weighing down trash bags and garbage trucks (again requiring more gasoline) and filling up landfills. The grounds also provide gardeners with effective compost that, in turn, helps naturally replenish soil. Following concerted research efforts, Starbucks reduced the size of its napkins and the thickness of its plastic bags. Together these innovations have allowed Starbucks, according to one report, “to prevent 1.8 million pounds of waste” each year from ending up in landfills. Company representatives also urged coffee growers to use fewer pesticides and more shade trees to protect the water supply and wildlife in the world’s developing regions.

Like a lot of companies, Starbucks ramped up its green actions in 2007, after Al Gore garnered his Oscar for the documentary
An Inconvenient Truth
. The company launched the “Be Green This Summer” campaign. As part of this, it initiated “Green Umbrellas for a Green Cause.” Hollywood celebrities America Ferrera, Chad Lowe, Lance Bass, Lawrence Bender, and Jo Frost, “who,” according to a Starbucks press release, “shared Starbucks’ passion for the environment,” transformed
the company’s trademark green umbrellas into “original works of art.” Afterward, they were auctioned off, with the proceeds going to Global Green USA, “a national leader in advocating for smart solutions to global warming.” During Be Green This Summer, Starbucks also introduced the online “Planet Green Game,” to teach players how to lessen their environmental imprint and trim greenhouse gas emissions. It followed this up by heavily promoting the “climate control film”
Arctic Tale
. Starbucks used this story of cuddly walruses and baby polar bears to, in its words, “inspire people to change the world” by caring more for the environment.
¹⁴

Despite the green games, films, and works of art, the paper cups kept leaving a deep environmental footprint. They consumed tremendous amounts of energy, fuel, and large patches of landfill space and raised questions about just how much Starbucks wanted to help the planet. This is not to say the company did nothing. It just promised a lot.

LOOKING FOR A BETTER CUP

Beginning in 1996, Starbucks and its partner Alliance for Environmental Innovation started looking at ways to develop a more eco-friendly cup. The search took ten years. The problem, as Ben Packard, Starbucks’ vice president for environmental affairs, claimed, was that “recycled content had never before been used in direct contact with food, especially steaming hot beverages.” After ten years, the Food and Drug Administration did approve a Starbucks cup made with 10 percent post–consumer use material.

In March 2006, Starbucks rolled out the new white containers with a flurry of green fanfare. These “first ever” cups, the company announced, underscoring its self-proclaimed willingness to sacrifice profit for the greater environmental good, cost a little more, but they were worth it. Along with the sleeves, the containers would help Starbucks help us to save the planet. More sober, yet still celebratory, reports from the Alliance for Environmental Innovation pointed out that Starbucks used
1.9 billion (now 2.2 billion) cups per year. As a result of Starbucks’ use of recycled materials, the Alliance estimated that in 2006, the coffee company saved 78,000 trees, enough energy to supply 640 homes with electricity for an entire year, enough water to fill 71 Olympic-size swimming pools, and enough trash to fully load 109 garbage trucks.
¹⁵

Despite these impressive numbers, the Starbucks cups still raised the proverbial question about whether the big cup—in this case, the green cup—was half full or half empty. When I told Elizabeth Royte about the cups containing 10 percent recycled material, she responded, “That isn’t much.” Then she asked, “Why didn’t they do this sooner?” Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist for the National Resources Defense Council, told a reporter, “It’s a helpful start, but 10 percent recycled content is minuscule.”
¹⁶
When I asked him over e-mail what would be a “more acceptable number,” he answered, “at least 30% pcw.”
(PCW
stands for post–consumer waste.) Ben Packard of Starbucks shook his head when I repeated to him what Royte and Hershkowitz had said. Cups with any more recycled material, he said, would fall apart, although one green-friendly paper company does feature a hot cup with 12 percent PCW. The same firm also offers a corn-based fully biodegradable and compostable cup. Beginning in 2007, a number of independent coffee shops around the country started to use these “ecotainers,” but they aren’t everyone’s preferred option.
¹⁷
Some worry that the cups emit a subtle odor that gets in the coffee. (The manufacturers dispute this point, but unlike Starbucks, they don’t have the marketing power to make their case to the widest audience.) Others point to the price. Paper cups with a top and a jacket typically cost between twelve to twenty-two cents each. Compostable containers can cost twice as much. So Starbucks clearly is willing to pay more for its cups, but not a whole lot more.
¹⁸

According to Steve Baker, owner of the GreenLine Paper Company in York, Pennsylvania, when it comes to developing better compostable cups or ones made from a higher percentage of post–consumer waste, the problem isn’t science. It’s economics. The big paper companies, he thinks, have too much invested in the production of virgin white paper.
Switching to more eco-friendly options would cost them in terms of infrastructure—kind of like Detroit and its deep and fatal attachment to oversized gasoline-powered engines—so they have stalled on the research and manufacturing of viable alternatives to virgin white paper. In several cases, Baker explained, they have bought up small companies producing alternative cups and buried them within their corporate structures. In other situations, they use greenish options as shields to deflect criticism. When an environmentally friendly reporter calls on the phone, they point to their green subsidiaries and invoke their own innocence by association. “Look,” they say, “we are part of the solution, not the problem.” Then when the investigators go away, Baker asserted, they go back to business as usual.

•  •  •

New kinds of disposable cups are not, however, the only answer to the problem of waste and coffee consumption. On its Web site, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) charts the sharp decline in landfill space across the country over the last decade. But the waste keeps coming. Thirty-four percent of the garbage dumped into the nation’s landfills comes from paper—more than any other single source. At the landfill, paper fills up holes in the ground, slowly decomposing, some-times leaking chemicals from print dyes into the soil. Paper presents additional environmental problems on the production side, creating more waste and pollution. Making paper—virgin white paper and even paper with some post–consumer use materials—requires, of course, copious amounts of water and energy, and that means triggering a cycle that means using more fossil fuels and generating more greenhouse gas emissions. Gasoline is needed to run the machines to plant the trees, cut them down, and get them to the paper mill. Natural gas may be used to power the machines to melt the trees into pulp. Then more gasoline is needed to transport the boxes of cups encased in plastic and separated by cardboard dividers to the stores and haul the paper-filled trash bags back to landfills and incinerators.

To tackle the landfill and general waste problems, EPA officials recommend reusing, as much as possible, existing materials. For coffee shops, this means offering washable mugs for in-store customers and filling up tumblers and thermoses for the takeaway people (at a discount, if possible). Just about everyone, except perhaps a few paper company executives, agrees that the environmental and fuel costs of hand washing or running a dishwasher to clean reusable cups are easily offset by the savings, both in terms of costs to the coffeehouse owner and benefits to the environment. According to one report, researchers found that compared to paper, ceramic mugs produced “an 86-percent drop in emissions of airborne particulates and a 29-percent decrease in greenhouse gases.”
¹⁹
Using glass instead of plastic, which, as mentioned, is particularly hard to get rid of, for cold drinks generates even greater green savings. “Glass use,” write the editors of
Environmental Packaging
, “meant a 99.7 percent cut in emissions of volatile organic compounds and a 99-percent decrease in nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide emissions.” Starbucks’ own research confirmed these findings. In a report written in conjunction with its partner the Alliance for Environmental Innovation, the company strongly endorsed the use of reusable cups, saying that replacing disposable plastic cups with glass would reduce energy use by 98 percent. Using reusable ceramic for hot drinks, the same report concludes, could reduce water usage by 64 percent and cut solid waste by 86 percent. Based on the evidence, Starbucks and everyone else agreed that reusable cups are good for the environment. Starbucks—on its Web page, in its corporate social responsibility report, and when company officials sit down with journalists—restates this point, saying that the firm endorses the use of reusables. On the ground, however, things aren’t so clear.
²⁰